Now With Ink and Watercolor

I wrap up the crabapple leaves with an ink and watercolor version. It felt good to return to the brush.

Crabapple and Colored Pencil Continued

Here is one of a few dried leaves I picked from my crabapple tree. Lots of colors used, from yellow, orange, red, browns, and a it of green. I found Dark Indigo #157 pleasing for shadows.




I have only twenty pencils, the ones recommended in Wendy Hollender's books, so it took a bit of mixing to get the range of color. Earlier today I read in her more recent book that she finds that beginners often lose form achieved with tonal range as they get overwhelmed with color. I can certainly validate by this desaturated copy of the image above. I'm thinking that by achieving a wide tonal range with color that I can get my images to pop.



Here is yesterday's sketch in b/w, perhaps a bit more contrast that today's.

Colored Pencil Practice

A while back I tooled up with colored pencils but quickly moved on. Here's Friday night's sketch with Polychromos. I spent about three hours here, experimenting with blending and then burnishing with Ivory.

Crabapple Leaves Sketch

I didn't want to take this too far, fearing that I might botch it up. But I think it'd be fun to transfer this to watercolor paper, perhaps with an ink border and some colored washes.


Here's how I set up my model.